Roughly 7 months ago I bought a Corsair K70 RGB MK.2 Rapidfire with Cherry MX Speed switches, as a replacement for the original Strafe RGB keyboard, which featured the Cherry MX Silent switches, after half dozen keys stopped working suddenly. The following is my views on the K70 MK.2 after 7 months of use.
First, the look and feel, in all honesty, with the much cheaper Strafe RGB MK.2 having almost the exact look as the K70 RGB MK.2, I feel it kind cheapens the more expensive K70 RGB MK.2 model. Anyway, like the original K70 RGB, it has a solid aluminum plate with the keys raised above the plate for easy cleaning, using something like a can of compressed air. It’s a typical Corsair product, well constructed and feels solid to the touch with the usual array of media, windows lock and LED brightness keys and volume roller.
Sadly, in use, I have been very disappointed with the $170 + tax keyboard. I hated the feel of the Cherry MX speed switches, I should have immediately returned it to Best Buy, but I thought, I just need to get used to the new switches. But, sadly, seven months on, I still hate the switches. Maybe it’s just me, but the lighter actuation force results in a lot more typing errors and adds nothing for gaming in my opinion.
Like all Corsair RGB peripherals, the RGB’s on the K70 RGB MK.2 cannot produce true white, it’s more like an aqua blue. Further, after four months of use, select RGB’s started to malfunction, notably, on the M, C and control keys, which have a slight red, or green hue to them, despite being set to white in
Despite how solid the K70 MK.2 feels, there are clearly some issues, such as the keyboard randomly stopping working, the lights are on, but no-one is home, key presses result in no input being sent to my PC. Even rebooting the computer does not work, after a reboot, the backlighting does not come back on, the keyboard appears to be dead. After some fiddling, swapping of USB ports, I got it to work again, bizarrely, once it’s working again, I switch back to the original USB 3.0 ports and it works just fine.
That is until it happens again weeks later, it’s completely random, I’ve never been doing the same thing twice when it happens. Initially, when it happened, I thought the USB ports being used were at fault, but it still happened when different USB ports were being used, and the peripherals that are now plugged into the USB ports that were originally used by the K70 MK.2 have worked flawlessly, not a single issue.
The bottom line for me, the K70 RGB MK.2 fails miserably for my use case, 85% typing. For $170, I’d expect better, I rate the original Strafe RGB higher than the K70 RGB MK.2 Rapid Fire, despite feeling cheaper, more plasticky, the Strafe RGB was a better keyboard to use. This experience has really soured my view of Corsair keyboards, that I will more than likely buy another brand of keyboard, something with solid white backlighting, I don’t care about RGB rainbow puke functionality on a keyboard. The only reason I bought an RGB keyboard is that I didn’t want blue or red backlighting, no white from Corsair.